Monthly Archives: February 2012

So, I was able to move beyond Sherlock Holmes and dive into War and Peace, allegedly the best novel ever written. Part I, the first 118 pages, reminds me of Downton Abbey set in Russia, complete with vaulted-ceilinged homes filled with Russian high society, and dinner served with a footman behind every dining chair. I…

My agent just sent my first novel out to publishers, and while I wait for the rejections to start pouring in, I can barely read. That deeper part of me that needs to engage with a book, is too consumed with anxiety to be available to a novel. In my predicament, stuck with this wrought…

Is there a plot to this book? It doesn’t matter. When you write like Kennedy, you pull readers into the heartbeating pulse of your characters, so that living and breathing their very moments takes on meaning and complexity that doesn’t require a firmament of plot to stand on it’s own. Passages in this novel sucked…

Author of What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us takes a few minutes to talk about writing fiction. How does a story come to you, an image, a voice, a character? For me, it’s usually either an image or a first line, which is related to voice. More often than not,…

INTERVIEW WITH JOE MENO By Sarah Anne Johnson You grew up playing in bands and writing lyrics for metal bands. How did this influence your desire to write? Do you listen to music when you write? For me, there’s always been a connection between narrative and music. The first things I ever wrote…

The best writing advice I ever got? How about I start with the worst I ever got, just for contrast? It came from all kinds of people, it was certainly well intentioned, and it was very, very simple: “Don’t screw around with Huckleberry Finn.” This could be generalized, of course, to “Don’t take chances.” And…

How does reading life inform your writing? What are you reading now? I think our lives, as readers are more or less ‘shadow lives’ to our lives as writers. There is a deep connection, though we may not be immediately conscious of a specific influence. That’s why it’s so important that we read literature, as…

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The Lightkeeper's Wife

#1 Nook Book

Sarah Johnson’s salty debut novel is everything historical fiction should be: an ode to a simpler period and place (in this case, 19th century Cape Cod), while complicating issues that are relevant today – making and breaking gender and sexual norms.